Janet Jackson Updates Website With Countdown Clock: Is Her Tour Back On?
The sudden appearance of a countdown clock on singer Janet Jackson’s official website, has fans of the “Runaway” superstar convinced that a new world tour is about to be announced.
Writers for BET note that the time marker, which is winding toward a Monday, May 1, deadline, materialized on Jackson’s online domain sometime on Friday, with no prior warning from the 50-year-old singer whatsoever.
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Jackson has mostly been in hiding since announcing last April that her high-selling Unbreakable World Tour, the music excursion planned around Janet’s eighth No. 1 studio album, 2015’s Unbreakable, would be postponed, as she planned to start her family with then-husband, Wissam Al Mana. The two have since separated, but remain on good terms with one another, according to the Daily Mail.
Janet and Wissam’s son, Eissa Al Mana, was welcomed to the world on January 3, 2017, as People explained, and made his public debut via his mother’s Instagram profile nearly three months later which, incidentally, was almost a year to the day that Jackson shut down the Unbreakable World Tour, as Refinery 29 reported.
“Janet had a stress-free healthy delivery and is resting comfortably,” a rep for Jackson and Wissam relayed to People, in a statement after Eissa’s birth.
Sadly, things took a sudden turn for the new family in April of this year when rumors of Janet and Al Mana deciding to end their marriage first began popping up in the tabloids, before they were ultimately confirmed by another statement from the couple’s rep with ABC News that same month.
“Janet Jackson and her husband, Wissam Al Mana, are splitting up,” the spokesperson shared, “but [they are] not divorcing.”
Since then, Wissam has heaped an abundance of praise onto Janet via his own website, although several media outlets first confused the intentions of the Qatari’s businessman’s correspondence with his estranged, but still friendly wife.
“To the most beautiful person in the world,” the 42-year-old wrote underneath the heading, ‘Love,’ as transcribed by Page Six, “thank you for your divine love, your eternal support and for being my best friend.”
“I love you so much.”
Immediately after the open show of support from Wissam, word began to trickle out from unknown sources that Janet was secretly planning a return to the stage, albeit with a new title for the rumored, dance-filled journey: The State of the World Tour, named after a song from Jackson’s critically-lauded, socially conscious 1989 LP, Rhythm Nation 1814.
Adding more fuel to the fan fervor, concert service Ticketmaster temporarily promoted some supposed upcoming dates and locations for Jackson’s alleged State of the World Tour, with several eagle-eyed fans spotting purchase links and snapping screenshots as evidence.
Entertainment conglomerate LiveNation, which owns Ticketmaster, “also allegedly created a placeholder page for [the excursion] on their website,” PopCrush adds, which was removed temporarily — PopCrush claims it led to an “Error” page for a time — but it has since been republished.
Along with the aforementioned hints, BET remarks that some of Jackson’s fans who purchased tickets for the dates of the Unbreakable World Tour that were ultimately postponed, have since been personally messaged by Ticketmaster to notify them of a possible update.
“Talks of the tour continuation may prove to be true as fans whose shows were rescheduled noticed updates to their Ticketmaster accounts,” BET expresses, “with [the] new title being added to the venture: the State of the World Tour.”
Despite all the talk, Jackson has remained silent on the matter, but she did promise her fans last year that her “unbreakable” reign wasn’t over just yet.
“I have not forgotten about you,” Janet Jackson sweetly swore at the end of her pregnancy announcement, “[and] I will continue the tour as soon as I possibly can.”
[Featured Image by Sean Gardner/Stringer/Getty Images]
